Newswise — Silicon Valley venture capital luminary John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, received the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business on Feb. 27.
The Lester Center's Lifetime Achievement Award honors role models of entrepreneurship, civic leadership, and philanthropy, whose success can teach future generations by the example they set.
"John Doerr's career has been at the epicenter of the information revolution," said Jerome Engel, executive director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. "He has a unique talent for finding and working with great entrepreneurs to build enterprises that shape the world we live in."
Brook Byers, one of Doerr's partners at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an affiliated partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Gordon Davidson, chairman of Fenwick & West; Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit; and Haas School Dean Tom Campbell spoke in Doerr's honor at the award ceremony.
Since joining Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1980, Doerr has helped launch some of the world's most innovative and successful technology companies, including Amazon.com, Google, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems. Doerr has been described as "the single best venture capitalist in the world" by Cisco Systems Chairman and CEO John Chambers and is a regular on Forbes magazine's annual "Midas Touch" list.
Doerr recently co-founded the New Schools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm that invests in the education system, and helped created TechNet, a voice of representation for the interests of the technology industry. Doerr has also recently been an outspoken advocate of green technologies.
"John's track record as an investor is legendary, but his passion and vision extend far beyond creating successful ventures, to helping create a successful society," Engel said. "His civic and philanthropic passions for education and health care will result in new opportunities and enhanced lives for many generations to come."
Recent past recipients of the Lester Center's Lifetime Achievement Award include Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation; Richard Kramlich, co-founder and general partner of early Silicon Valley venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates; and Warren Hellman, chairman and co-founder of Hellman & Friedman, LLC, a private equity investment firm based in San Francisco.
About the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the leading producers of new ideas and knowledge in all areas of business and is also influenced by its proximity to Silicon Valley. In 1970, Haas became one of the first business schools to teach entrepreneurship. In 1991, it established the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to foster academic programs, community outreach, and campus-wide collaboration in new venture creation, entrepreneurship, and venture capital. The Lester Center provides on-going support and guidance in these areas as part of its core mission to enhance entrepreneurship at the university and in the business community. For more information, visit http://entrepreneurship.berkeley.edu/.
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